Top 59 Lynd Quotes
#1. Fletcher Lynd Seagull was still quite young, but already he knew that no bird had ever been so harshly treated by any Flock, or with so much injustice.
Richard Bach
#2. Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#3. There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer.
Robert Lynd
#4. The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#5. It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.
Robert Lynd
#6. One of the sources of pride in being a human being is the ability to bear present frustrations in the interests of longer purposes.
Helen Lynd
#7. [History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#8. The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#9. If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.
Robert Lynd
#10. Darling, the bath's absolutely right. Will you marry me?'
She snorted. 'You need a slave, not a wife.
Ian Fleming
#11. Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#12. W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#13. The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.
Robert Lynd
#14. It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that one has never heard before.
Robert Lynd
#15. Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#16. Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
Helen Lynd
#17. In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.
Robert Lynd
#18. Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#19. Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#20. There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
Robert Lynd
#21. Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#22. There are travelers who fear to own delicate hands more than to meet a lion, and soldiers who would rather lose a limb than gain a beautiful nose by artificial methods.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#23. The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#24. One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#26. This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#27. Friendship is not going to stand the pressure of greatly great guidance for quite extensive.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#28. It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#30. The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#31. Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#32. When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#33. No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up.
Robert Lynd
#35. I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#36. It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#37. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#38. There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#39. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#40. Most of us can remember a time when a birthday - especially if it was one's own - brightened the world as if a second sun has risen.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#41. We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#42. Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.
Robert Lynd
#44. The lovers of beauty must unite in a league, and carry out some great propagandist work through the country. They must demand the extermination of the bulldog and the dismantling of the cheap villa, both of which are responsible for a deal of our contentment amid ugliness.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#46. The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense
it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#47. Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#48. Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints.
Helen Lynd
#50. No man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#51. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#52. There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#54. When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#55. Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult ... one saw how very little body there was underneath.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#56. With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#57. It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
Robert Lynd
#58. Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#59. A cat is only technically an animal, being divine.
Robert Lynd
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